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The New York Times bestseller Now I Can Die in Peace is now available in paperback with a new afterword (and more footnotes) by the author

"The Red Sox won the World Series." To Citizen No. 1 of Red Sox Nation, those seven words meant "No more 1918 chants. No more smug glances from Yankee fans. No more worrying about living an entire life -- that's eighty years, followed by death -- without seeing the Red Sox win a Series." But once he was able -- finally -- to type those life-changing words, Bill Simmons decided to look back at his "Sports Guy" columns for the last five years to find out how the miracle came to pass. And that's where the trouble began.

The result is Now I Can Die in Peace, a hilarious and fresh new look at some of the best sportswriting in America, with sharp, critical commentary (and fresh insights) from the guy who wrote it in the first place.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

Following the 2004 season, The Sports Guy wrote the best of the many books about the Red Sox championship run. In preparation for opening day of 2009, he has revised it to include 100 pages of updated columns.

Simmons starts the new section with an analysis of how Sox fans confronted a new and uncursed existence. He asks "What happens when your identity gets stripped away, when you get the chance to start from scratch?" He follows this with: a comparison of Larry Bird and Big Papi, coverage of the Dice-K acquisition, the 2007 championship, the Rocket and the Roids, a defense of Manny being Manny and the 2008 loss to the Rays. Through it all, Simmons writing is more about what it is to be a fan than it is about the team or the game.

If you strip away the occassionally on target pop culture references and the more accurately directed humor, this book is the story of the love affair of Simmons, his family and his city for a team. (Part of that sentence is stolen from Ken Coleman's 1967 Impossible Dream narration.) The Sports Guy proudly wears his passion on his sleeve: "I think like a fan, write like a fan and try like hell to keep it that way." It is a lifelong relationship: "You love sports most when you are 16, then you love it a little less every year."

Reading these columns, another diehard instinctively feels an affinity for Simmons and appreciates his commitment, knowledge and intermittant suffering. This is made easier because the author often recognizes when he has stepped across the line that separates the healthfully obsessed from the not quite well (One of his footnotes points out, "This paragraph made me sound like an a**hole.Read more ›

I've read Bill Simmons' ESPN.com columns since they began in 2001. His ability to combine sports with pop culture references made him a unique writer and one who can be wildly fun to read as you never knew what he could come up with. One column may be a running diary of his fantasy league basketball draft while another may deal with using "The Godfather" quotes to summarize the baseball season.

Bill's new book contains columns that he wrote for ESPN.com as well as those written before that time dealing with his obsession with the Boston Red Sox and their attempt to win their first World Series since 1918. If you started reading Simmons on ESPN.com, you'll get about 100 or so pages of columns you've never read before (written prior to mid-2001). The remaining 250 pages will probably seem familiar to you as they all appeared on ESPN.com, but Bill has added footnotes along the edges with additional obsevations, witty comments and thoughts on how he feels about what he wrote at this point in time. He also has appeared to rework his columns, with the most notable change being that he has added considerable profanity to his ESPN.com columns (which was not there when originally published). I thought that was an interesting twist to his reworking of the material.

The ups and downs of the Red Sox, with the gut-wrenching loss in Game 7 of the ALCS against the Yankees in 2003 chronicled as well as the joy he experienced from his team finally winning it all in 2004. He covers all the emotions well. When his 2004 season columns were originally written, I was genuinely happy for him and the other Red Sox fans, as they had gone through a lot over the years.Read more ›

By compiling five years worth of past articles written for ESPN's Page Two, Bill Simmons manages to write, re-write, comment upon, criticize, and yes-even argue with his infamous Sports Guy musings while telling the story of how the Red Sox finally won the World Series. This is no lazy rehash of old columns. His ingenious use of footnotes (there are at least 2 million or so per page) adds layers of "back story" to the plot. If you are a dedicated Sports Guy reader, you can skip re-reading all those columns again and go straight to the footnotes for his skewed hindsight and hilarious ramblings on serial killers, mullet haircuts, Hoover Dam ,and of course, the Yankees. If you've never read Simmons before, this book is a perfect introduction to the Sports Guy.

Rather than being the typical sports retrospective play-by-play of the 2004 World Series, Simmons manages to tell a very personal and very funny story about becoming and staying a true believer. Sure, sure-we all know the ending of this story-the Sox finally win. In Simmons' hands, the ending is hardly the point. Rather, it's the five-year ride he takes us on, with stops in Hollywood, Fenway, matrimony, and even fatherhood. It makes no difference if you love the Sox, hate the Yankees, or even care about sports. Read this book if you enjoy sharp, opinionated, fast moving, and funny writing.

Reading the Sports Guy has always been a mixed experience for me. There are times when he makes me laugh out loud, but for every guffaw, there's an equal feeling that I've just spent five or so minutes of my life that I'll never get back. This book helped me understand why I have these feelings.

The pluses: There are some laugh out loud funny moments. And I enjoyed reading the earlier columns from the pre-ESPN days.

The minuses: 1. the 500 marginal "footnotes." They're not superfluous; in fact, as the book progresses, they're more readable than the original text itself. But the way they're placed along the page margins is very distracting; and more than that, as I continued reading, I concluded that they were an extremely lazy way of putting these columns into context. It's as though Simmons couldn't have been bothered to write short essays introducing each section, where he could have made these marginal thoughts into something special, because it would have required some real reflection and construction in his writing. Which brings me to...

2. Reading The Sports Guy in a concentrated dose in print instead of online two or three times a week is a very different experience, and what works as you're reading online over morning coffee doesn't carry over as well in print. Simmons's writing style can best be described as, "let me just throw everything up against the wall, and if some of it sticks, OK, and if none of it does, that's OK, too." The book made me realize just how much I've skimmed through the online columns.

And I agree with a previous reviewer: the typos, as well as factual errors make we wonder if anyone read galley proofs, or if everything was just downloaded as is.

And Simmons should re-read his own footnote 426 and take his own advice where his copious TV and movie references are concerned. If he is serious about being a good writer rather a purveyor of cheap yuks, he'll take his own advice.

More About the Author

Bill Simmons writes "The Sports Guy" column for ESPN.com's Page 2 and ESPN: The Magazine. He is the author of Now I Can Die In Peace, founded the award-winning bostonsportsguy.com website, and was a writer for Jimmy Kimmel Live. He commutes between his home in Los Angeles and Fenway Park.